General Motors Poaches Infiniti Chief De Nysschen To Revamp Cadillac

Johan de Nysschen, one of the global auto industry's boldest leaders, is on the move again, headed to Cadillac as its new president after he left the top post at Infiniti this week. The 54-year-old de Nysschen joins the
General Motors leadership team as an executive vice president of the company beginning September 1 and reports to GM President Dan Ammann.

DeNysschen submitted his resignation to Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn last week after just two years on the job at Infiniti, where he worked to turn around the fortunes of the luxury marque and establish greater independence of management for it.

His new role at GM appears to give de Nysschen the broad authority to reshape the Cadillac brand that he enjoyed at
Audi of America before he left in 2012 and which he then sought at Infiniti, with some difficulty. He will become the only chief in auto-industry history to have a shot at reshaping major German, Japanese and American luxury brands.

GM said that de Nysschen will be responsible for all aspects of Cadillac globally including sales, pricing and network development, strategic brand development and marketing and product portfolio planning, including critical input for product engineering and design.

"Johan brings to our company vast experience in the development and proper execution of luxury automotive brands," Amman said in a statement. "With over 20 years in this exact space, especially in the development of the Audi brand, his track record proves he is the perfect executive to lead Cadillac for the long term."

Cadillac clearly has been drifting. New Chief Marketing Officer Uwe Ellinghaus has been shaking up marketing, but there has been instability for a while at the top of the brand including sales supervision. GM said on Thursday that it is returning Cadillac chief Bob Ferguson to his old post as the company's top lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Ferguson had been functioning in that role on a de facto basis anyway since the ignition-switch recall blew into a crisis in March.

Partly as a result, sales for the brand have suffered even though its product lineup has continued to improve. Cadillac sales were flat in June and were off by 4.5 percent for the year to date compared with 2013. Meanwhile, Buick sales were up by more than 12 percent for the year.

But characteristically, de Nysschen was quick to suggest that he's got some solutions in mind. "The combination of strong corporate leadership and exceptional engineering resources [at GM] represents the perfect combination to restore Cadillac to its place among global premium brands," de Nysschen said in the GM press release. "The recognition of the brand is immense, and the progress on the fundamental product front is widely acclaimed."

Meanwhile, Infiniti must go back to the drawing board. Ghosn recruited de Nysschen to turn around Infiniti after the South Africa-born auto chieftain had revived Audi of America, helping boost Audi's market share to 9.5 percent in 2011 from 5.3 percent in 2004 before leaving in July 2012.

But de Nysschen was broadly known to be frustrated early in his new role at Infiniti, concluding that it was unrealistic for Ghosn to expect the brand to reach the goal he had been given of 500,000 annual sales globally by 2017 and 600,000 sales by 2020. Infiniti sales in the United States actually declined by 2 percent last year, to about 116,000 units, while those of rivals
Lexus and Audi increased by 12 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

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De Nysschen's frustrations have been evident for some time, even in public. "We'll be a significant player in the premium market, but we'll still be small enough to be able to be exclusive," he said, gamely, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, in January. At that point Ghosn already had downgraded his goal for Infiniti to sales of 500,000 units by 2020, three years later than originally planned.

Among Infiniti's problems have been a lack of coverage of all primary segments in the luxury market -- it was only in segments representing 58 percent of American luxury-vehicle sales by early this year -- domination of its product development and other operations by the larger Nissan brand, and unfavorable exchange rates that ate into profitability of Infiniti's mostly Japan-made vehicles.

Actually, de Nysschen has overseen a significant turnaround in Infiniti's fortunes this year. It sold a record 101,220 vehicles globally in the first six months of 2014, Infiniti announced last week, up 30 percent from a year earlier. And just last month Nissan and Daimler AG unveiled plans to spend $1.36 billion to produce 300,000 compact Infiniti and Mercedes vehicles each year at a new factory in Mexico, starting in 2017.